3-person cast shines in mash-up comedy at Madison theater

Madison — In the arresting and audacious Prologue to Liz Duffy Adams' "Or," — the rollicking but also moving mash-up of 1660s Restoration comedy and 1960s idealism being directed by Jennifer Uphoff Gray at Forward Theater — actor Amy J. Carle gives the audience quite a bit more than the standard warning about silencing cellphones.

Using the "O" in Adams' title as a symbol of all that theater allows us, Carle offers a paean to the imagination, which can reshape actual people and events while overcoming false dichotomies such as "male or female, straight or gay."

Adams' gambit consciously invokes, and then deliberately inverts, one of the most famous openings to any play: Shakespeare's Prologue to "Henry V," in which we're urged to imagine that the "wooden O" of the Globe Theatre can encompass "the vasty fields of France."

Shakespeare envisions his "O" containing and faithfully re-creating an emphatically male moment of winners' history, in which time might be bottled "into an hour-glass" commemorating one of England's greatest kings.

Adams' "O" rejects any such strategy of containment, insisting that we each wear far too many selves to be "hemmed/Within a made-up symmetry of sense." Aphra doesn't compose for history, but "for pleasure." Rather than picturing time as a frozen moment, she sees it as a flowing river that won't "stand still."

And it doesn't in the 100 intermission-free minutes of this play, during which Carle's Aphra shares the stage with two actors — Norman Moses and Colleen Madden — each playing three characters while working through enough quick-changes to earn their backstage helpers a well-deserved curtain call (fabulous costumes by Holly Payne).

Moses begins the night as a jailer; Aphra is in the clink for debt, because her sovereign king hasn't paid her what she's owed for her espionage. When we next see Moses, he has become Charles II himself, come to the jail to free Aphra from bondage.

Or has he? All Aphra wants to do is write; Charles wants her as his mistress. Like both the jailer and Moses' third character — a seedy spy who was once Aphra's lover — all of the men in this play are trying in various ways to keep a good woman down. Moses captures their hungry need and their alternately petulant and nasty resentment when Aphra won't play by their rules.

Conversely, Madden's three women — a clever servant, a theater producer and famous actor Nell Gwyn — each confirm that sisterhood is powerful, liberating Aphra into a fuller sense of herself. Madden is terrific in each role; her rendition of the quirky producer's monologue and Nell's intoxicating celebration of a dawning utopia — think "Hair" — are standouts.

Buoyed by this support, Carle takes care of the rest. On a stage strewn with props from Forward's first five years, Carle gives us a charismatically warm and romantic Aphra Behn. Watching her — and reflecting on this magnificent company that's risen from the ashes of the Madison Repertory Theatre — it's easy to believe that in the world of theater, anything is possible.

IF YOU GO

"Or," continues through April 13 at the Overture Center, 201 State St., Madison. For tickets, go to overturecenter.com.

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